The disintegration of the Soviet Union had removed the greatest threat against China. The size of China was already enormous. It was doubtful whether a single government could indefinitely control a billion people. There was no obvious advantage in gaining some millions more by extending the frontiers to the north and west. Moreover, the demographic situation was more or less under control in China so that there was no insatiable land hunger. If a certain deference could be paid to history, respect for which had survived the cultural revolution, and some lands which had historically belonged to China could be reunited with it, there might well be a basis for a fairly reasonable settlement which included a renunciation of further major expansion. On the other hand, the smaller states of East and South-East Asia were going to be in some fear of Chinese intentions and would need American reassurance or guarantee.
As far as military material was concerned, there was a possibility of reasonable compromise. The Americans (and their European allies) were anxious above all to make sure that Soviet nuclear weapons did not fall into the wrong hands. They wanted examples of the latest Soviet technology, particularly the Typhoon and Delta submarines and their missiles, but for the most part they were indifferent to the acquisition by China of such conventional weapons as could be salvaged from the Soviet forces, though it must be said that some of the Asian states had distinct misgivings.
There could also be ready agreement between China and the West that no attempt would be permitted to restore or create a central authority over the whole of Soviet Asia. There was little risk of this occurring in the circumstances at the end of the 1985 war but a mutual guarantee that any future attempt to restore a central authority would be resisted by both sides helped considerably to smooth the negotiations.
The future of the ethnic minorities in Central Asia had many complications. The most important in the context of the American-Chinese negotiation was that there were people of the same ethnic origin and culture living on both sides of the Soviet-Chinese frontier and the establishment of independent states out of the remains of Soviet Central Asia might seem to the Chinese an undesirable magnet for some of the Moslem peoples of Sinkiang. The Chinese might have been prepared to make use of this circumstance to subvert the Soviet Central Asians before and during the period of the war, but it was a different matter if there were to be independent states of thirty to forty million Turkic-speaking Moslems on the former Soviet side of the border who would obviously be in some sort of relations with their co-religionists on the Chinese side. An attempt to ensure that such states should be under ultimate Chinese suzerainty of the kind once enjoyed by Tibet was rejected by the Americans in the name of self-determination and in the interests of Western relations with the rest of the Moslem world. Equally, it had to be conceded on the Western side that it would be wrong to attempt to create or to permit the creation of a single state embracing all the non-Soviet peoples of Central Asia. Since this was not in any case the wish of the Soviet Central Asians themselves, it was easy to make the concession. Their national identity, in so far as they had been able to maintain under Soviet domination their separate languages and cultures, was as Uzbeks, Kirghiz, Turkomans, Tajiks and so on, not as a conglomerate of Central Asian Moslems.
The most suitable structure seemed likely to be a federation of these various nationalities with a fairly weak central government and a high degree of local autonomy, which was also sensible in view of the long distances between the centres of population and the disastrous state in which communications had been left by the war and subsequent tumults. It was possible, therefore, to reach agreement with the Chinese that both they and the Western allies would favour, or at least do nothing to oppose, the creation of a loose federation of this kind and that neither would seek to establish a dominant position with regard to it.
These Central Asian republics were inhabited by the remains of the Turkic and Iranian peoples after the great westward migrations from this area which had overrun first Iran and then Asia Minor. They had themselves had a glorious past but had more recently sunk from sight after conquest by Tsarist Russia and incorporation after 1919 in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Only recently, in the 1970s, had their historical cities and monuments become the target of Western tourists, dazzled by the romantic names of Bokhara, Tashkent and Samarkand, and by the still brilliant remains of tombs and mosques and palaces.
Their populations now amounted to some forty to fifty million people, the vast majority still speaking Turkic or Iranian languages as their mother tongues, in spite of strenuous efforts by Moscow to promote Russianization, and still maintaining allegiance to the Moslem religion, in spite of the closure of mosques and much hostile propaganda by the Soviet bureaucracy.
There had not for many years been any evidence of nationalist agitation in this area. Material living standards had greatly improved since the period of native rule and there was just enough latitude in the use of the native languages and the promotion of native culture to satisfy the rather mild aspirations of the ethnic leaders. It was the events of 1979-80 in neighbouring Moslem territories which began to draw the attention of the inhabitants to the outside world, and made them more aware of the existence of fellow Moslems. They could not fail to note the contrast between the comparatively tolerant behaviour of the Soviet masters whom they saw in their midst and the behaviour of the same Soviets in Afghanistan, where a people of similar stock to themselves were visibly oppressed by the imposition of a communist regime and then violently attacked when they tried to express their opposition to it.
The first Soviet occupation troops in Afghanistan had been largely drawn from the nearby Central Asian territories but the strain upon them had been too great when they were ordered to shoot at fellow Central Asians and fellow Moslems. These units were accordingly quite soon withdrawn, to be replaced by others with a higher proportion of non-Central Asian and non-Moslem conscripts. But the continuing lack of success of the Soviets in their attempts to 'pacify' Afghanistan and the continuing casualties which were reported as occurring in their forces (exaggerated no doubt as a result of the suppression of genuine news) led to a significant build-up of nationalist feeling in the Central Asian republics. People were already beginning to remind themselves that the constitution of the Soviet Union provided for the voluntary secession of any of the constituent republics, even though in practice the discussion of this possibility had led to a sticky end for those who had been rash enough to try it on. It should therefore have been no surprise to the Soviet authorities that the check to their advance in Europe, the defection of units fighting there whose men came largely from the Central Asian area, and the marked unwillingness of the Soviet forces in Afghanistan to carry out their warlike operations once the news from Europe turned sour, should precipitate an outbreak of nationalism. This happened first in Uzbekistan, where the populace took to the streets and proclaimed independence, and soon after that in other Central Asian republics of the Soviet Union as well.
Looking now further south it is clear that India will be in no better state after 1985 than before to enter into any far-reaching economic or defensive international system. With population increase still out of control and with sprawling bureaucratic confusion as the nearest approach to government, the struggle to maintain a place in the modern world is going to seem increasingly forlorn. The loss of the Soviet counterpoise to China will upset the Indian external balancing act, and the break-up of a neighbouring empire may stimulate fissiparous tendencies in the Indian federation. If China, or a Sino-Japanese co-prosperity system succeeds, there will be many Indian politicians pressing to follow this example. But the more likely chance must be that India will long remain an inward-looking depressed area, whose future, like that of much of Africa, will depend on the successful restoration of the north-south dialogue, never yet very fruitful and now grievously interrupted by the 1985 war, and the even more pressing agenda of post-war settlement in northern Asia.